Vulnerability and resilience in marginalized rural communities. Case study: projects for reduction of risk exclusion in Dolj County
Vulnerability and resilience in marginalized rural communities. Case study: projects for reduction of risk exclusion in Dolj County

Summary/Abstract: In the post revolutionary Romania, the number of socially assisted people sums up a quarter of the demographically declining population. At the beginning of this year, the National Statistics Institute registered 409.869 people benefitting from the minimum granted income, with allocated amounts totalizing almost 16 million lei. The 1st place in the national top is occupied by Dolj County, with more than 12.000 persons of a total population of ca. 690.000 persons. At the level of South-West Oltenia region, the social exclusion risk rate was of 45.3% in 2017, almost 10 percent higher than the national rate of 35.7%, the main indicators according to which they were included in the category of the marginalized groups being education, occupancy and housing. Given that poverty is almost three times more acute in the rural environment than in the urban one and the severe material deprivation rate is more accentuated in the small communities where life conditions are harder, as a consequence of the obvious cleavages (school abandon, subsistence agriculture, few or non-existent workplaces, accentuated migration, low life expectancy, lack of consumer goods etc.). Under these circumstances, there is a strong need for projects aiming at sustaining and developing resilience, the necessity of mapping these groups and communities at a national level being transposed, in 2016, in an atlas of marginalized areas, based on which solutions for diminishing the effects and fighting the causes of poverty were build up, by means of projects dedicated to the human capital. Our article presents the analysis of the conjunction of the rural communities in Dolj County Vârtop-Plenița, carried out for the justification of the financial allocation necessary for reducing the rural-urban disparities, increasing life expectancy through the improvement of the housing indicator, stimulating school continuation and the reduction of school abandon, investing in the qualification of those people who have no profession and stimulating occupancy by means of employment or job creation /development of the entrepreneurial segment.

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